Big Civil Services Reforms For IAS And Central Employees, Here's All You Need To Know About Mission Karmayogi

Yesterday (2 September), union cabinet approved a mega reform for the government employees based on the three pillars of 'governance, performance and accountability'.

The initiative titled ‘Mission Karmayogi’ targets 4.6 million central government employees. They promise a shift from rules to roles, silos to coordination, inter disciplinary movements and continuous capacity building of the public servants.”

The fundamental focus of the reform is the creation of a ‘citizen centric civil service’ capable of creating and delivering services conducive to economic growth and public welfare, reports PIB.

“..the ultimate purpose of all this -- it is basically to equip the civil servant, with domain and functional competencies, which would be goal driven, and also build behavioural competencies," C Chandramouli, secretary of the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) was quoted as saying by the Livemint.

“Civil servant should be imaginative and innovative, proactive and polite, professional and progressive, energetic and enabling, transparent and tech-enabled, constructive and & creative in order to meet the challenges of the society," he added.

The secretary also said that the initiative could be the largest civil service reform in the world in terms of spread and in terms of the depth.

• aligning work allocation of civil servants by matching their competencies to the requirements of the post

• emphasis 'on-site learning' to complement the ‘off-site’ learning

• create an ecosystem of shared training infrastructure and to make available to all civil servants

• mid-career training will now on will be available to all government staff instead of the top officers alone, and their profile and assessment will be continuous

An Integrated Government Online Training ‘iGOT Karmayogi’ Platform will be set up with appropriate monitoring and evaluation framework for performance evaluation of all users of the platform .

Previously, the iGOT model was used successfully to train health professionals for the COVID-19 challenge.

The Mission also brings a new structure to implement the reforms, comprising of:

• a PM Human Resource (HR) Council headed by the PM and comprising some state chief ministers, few cabinet ministers and national and international experts

• a Capacity Building Commission to harmonies and training institutions

• a Cabinet secretary Coordination Unit to monitor progress, and execution of plans

• a special purpose vehicle (SPV), a company, which will manage all the digital resources, and also create a marketplace for content for effective training of government employees.

Previously, the Modi government had taken several steps to reform the civil services.

These included hiring reforms by bringing a nodal recruiting agency, lateral entry in joint secretary level positions, provision of non IAS officers in policy making roles, training of government servants through a program called ‘arambh’, and short term posting of young IAS officers at different central departments on a probation before their posting in districts

Mission Karmayogi constitutes post recruitment reform across cadres and positions – from a constable to the director general of police, from an assistance section officer to the secretaries’ level.